"Parking garages and underground car parks are typical examples," says Stefan Stümper.  He works for the Audi Electronics Venture, an Audi subsidiary for pre-development in the area of electronics. Not every driver feels happy when driving around looking for an empty parking bay. It takes time to find one, insert the car carefully into it and take it out again later. Our Garage Parking Pilot project assists the driver in performing these tasks."

Stümper explains this technology by taking an Audi driver who wants to see a movie one evening as an example. Using the car's online link while driving into town he checks with the garage's management system whether there is an unoccupied piloted parking bay. This information appears on the car's MMI screen; the driver selects the most suitable garage and the navigation system guides him to it.

At the entrance the driver stops briefly to select any other services he needs on the MMI screen, for instance automatic wireless charging of the battery if he is driving an Audi e-tron model. He then gets out of the car, locks it and uses his smartphone to issue a 'park' signal to the system.

In the garage a central control unit manages the piloted parking process. It makes WLAN contact with the car at the entrance and calls up the principal data, from which it learns the car's size. The central computer then locates the nearest suitable parking bay and transmits a schematic route map to the car.

This 'digital thread' operates the Audi's electromechanical steering as it moves through the garage at a speed of between five and ten kilometers an hour. This aim of the project is to perform the parking function reliably without the car having to be upgraded technically. The Audi therefore uses existing series-production sensors to identify its position. An intelligent computer algorithm compiles a complete picture of the surrounding area and compares it with the garage's route map.

If there is the slightest risk of a collision, the Audi comes to a halt. The same applies if radio contact with the central computer is lost. The garage control unit monitors all the car's movements  with highly accurate laser scanners. According to pre-development engineer Stümper: The equipment is accurate to the nearest centimeter, but the true challenge is not achieving reliability in the individual modules but in getting all the necessary sensor and control modules to work together as a single, complex overall concept."

After the driver has enjoyed his movie, he calls the garage parking computer by smartphone and instructs it to send the car to the exit point - assuming that he didn't already ask for it to be returned at a specific time. The Audi then re-appears and the parking fee is debited automatically.

"This scenario is only the beginning," says Stefan Stümper. "Our first step would be to equip separate areas in the garages for piloted parking. The central computer would control all the vehicle movements there for maximum speed and safety. Since there are no people in these areas, the ceilings can be lower, the parking bays smaller and the lighting less powerful, to save space and reduce energy consumption. We can also install automated car wash and refueling systems - and of course recharging points for e-tron models."

Science fiction? Not any more - though of course liability questions are very important, and will have to be solved before these systems go into large-scale production. Audi is taking aviation as a guideline: the 'automatic pilot' has been commonplace  for many years, but the final responsibility still rests with the human pilot. The same will apply to the automobile. This is why Audi speaks about 'piloted driving'. The garage parking pilot is a firm element  in the new networked mobility that Audi has named 'Audi connect'. This term covers all applications and developments that form links between Audi automobiles and their owners, with the Internet, with the infrastructure and with other vehicles - to serve and benefit the customer.